Free Fire - C. J. Box [123]
Nate nodded.
“Anyway,” McCann said, “Barron asked me to meet with Langston to try to secure a permit for them. He said he had investorslined up all over the world who would put up big bucks if EnerDyne got the permit. It had to do with bioengineering or something I don’t really understand. It was later when I realized Barron was a fucking con man. He was fishing, is what he was doing. He was just hoping that if his company could start harvestingmicrobes that maybe, just maybe, his engineers could figure out a use for them. Since the microbes from the park are unique to anywhere else, he might have been right, but who knows?”
“Did you get the permit for them?” Joe asked.
“I’m getting to that.”
Nate stripped off more tape.
“Okay, okay,” McCann said. “I found out that some Zephyr employees were up in arms about the harvesting permits. They were environmental extremists, and they planned to start letter campaigns to newspapers and politicians and some kind of on-linefund-raising movement to wage war on Genetech and anyoneelse who was harvesting microbes. Legally harvesting microbes, I might add.”
“That’s where Rick Hoening comes in,” Joe said.
“He was their leader. He made no bones about what he planned to do, and he was getting a buzz going in the park and within the environmental community all over the country and internationally. They wanted a moratorium on any new permits, and an investigation into who they’d been given to in the past and why. Langston was beside himself, to say the least, since he was the guy who signed the permits in the first place. Genetech slipped him a little something on the side, you see. I know that because I delivered the envelopes of cash.”
“Bastard,” Nate said.
“Barron and EnerDyne were even more up in arms when they found out about Hoening’s plans. If he was successful, they’d never get their piece of the pie.”
“That’s where you saw your opportunity,” Joe said.
“Being a lawyer is all about recognizing opportunities.”
“And here I thought it was more than that,” Joe said. “Silly me.”
“I really didn’t care how it came out,” McCann said. “I looked forward to the fees that would come from litigation. But I did contact Hoening on behalf of Genetech. That’s when he told me about the flamers. He thought Genetech’s activities were causing some kind of disturbance, and he was damned mad about it. I remembered what the Genetech employee had said, and I gave this information to Barron. He sent a couple of his engineers up here, and they were the ones who made the connection between the microbes and the seam of coal. Barron was out-of-his-mind happy, and knew he really had something. The information was worth billions.
“See, the problem with coal gasification is the huge expense of building the plant, and the fact that Western coal is soft and might require so much coal to get gas that the dollars just wouldn’t work. But if these Yellowstone microbes could be injectedinto the ground, into that coal, a big plant wouldn’t be necessary.The coal gasification would occur underground, naturally. All EnerDyne would need to do was tap it and pipe it out. And I was the only person outside of his company who knew it. So we made a deal. They retained me as their counsel. Barron started working the inside, finding players who could help him get exclusivityin exchange for positions and stock within the company.
“But before we could get everything into place, Rick Hoeningstarted causing trouble.”
“So you had to stop him,” Joe said.
“Yes, I had to stop him.”
“But why kill the others? Why didn’t you quit with Hoening that morning?”
McCann shrugged. “Two reasons, Game Warden. If I’d walked away after Hoening went down, the investigation would have centered on him and me, and no doubt someone before you would have put the pieces together long before now. Plus, I had no doubt Hoening had recruited his friends to his cause. They would have carried out the campaign against bio-mining and made Hoening into some kind of martyr. Taking them out eliminated the effort entirely, and cast everything